Occupy Wall Street: Where Art & Politics Mix

So recently art – and this blog – have been on the backburner, and I’ve been reading into all sorts: the Arab Awakening, Energy, Palestine, the Global Economy, Science… grown up stuff :p

One of the most interesting things has been the whole Occupy movement. Just generally:

(1) I like the art work and the posters.

(2) It’s interesting seeing the same libertarian arguments once leveled against ‘foreign tyrants’ in colonial times being leveled against corporations today. It’s like the ‘land of the free’ has woken up to figure out someone’s been jinxing it…. there’s a lot of Thomas Paine and Jefferson being quoted. In London people are camped outside St. Paul’s and you’re getting this kind of debate.

(3) Even Hollywood is getting in on the act:

A couple of years ago there were two widely disseminated studies in London. One found that social mobility was at its lowest in the country since Victorian times.

The second found that individuals don’t measure their wealth in objective terms – instead people measure how rich they are in relation to those around them. So the study found that being rich wasn’t about having ‘X’ – it was about having X more than Y.

A lot of 2011 has been spent watching medieval social grievances against modern day nobles and serf like systems of government play out in twenty first century terms: through design, cell phones, the internet, and even movies.